As the shadow of the shutdown passes, it's proper to be reminded again that this fight involved spending levels that are materially suppressing economic growth and hampering the recovery. Specifically, the deal soon to be voted on leaves the sequester in place, at least until Jan. 15. This was a sadly predictable outcome of the standoff, as we noted at the outset . True, it does provide for further negotiation and debate on the sequester, but...

WASHINGTON - President Obama blamed the "extreme right wing" of the Republican Party for a budget standoff that has pushed the government to the edge of the first shutdown in 17 years, and he made one last plea Monday to House Republicans to pass a spending bill before a midnight deadline. “One faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government doesn't get to shut down the entire government just to re-fight the results of an election,” Obama said in a brief appearance in the White House briefing room.

WASHINGTON - Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Orange County, the senior California Republican in Congress, was in office during the 1995-96 government shutdowns. He acknowledges that it hurt the GOP, but he sees the risk of another shutdown as "part of the game" of negotiating changes to the healthcare law he hates. "There's never any progress without risk," he told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a freshman Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area, was 15 when the federal government last shut down.

For Republicans thinking of running for president in 2016, one imperative may be rising fast: not to be Bob Dole. The former Kansas senator was the party's nominee for president in 1996, in the campaign that followed the last big government shutdowns. His opponent, Bill Clinton, succeeded in wrapping the brouhaha -- then, as now, blamed more on Republicans in Congress than on the Democratic president -- around Dole's neck, tight as a noose and just as lethal, politically. In ads and speeches, Clinton repeatedly castigated the “Dole-Gingrich” agenda, tying the senator to the prime mover behind the shutdowns, House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

They had come a long way to see the giant pandas. Several thousand miles, in fact. But when Muscovites John Boyko and Corina Naraevskaya strolled up leafy Connecticut Avenue to the entrance of the National Zoo Tuesday, they were confronted with a locked gate and a large white sign: “All Smithsonian Museums and the National Zoo are closed today due to the government shutdown.” “We are a little bit shocked,” said Naraevskaya. The couple's prospect for a glimpse of the cuddly giant animals chomping on bamboo looked grim for this trip.

Food expert Marion Nestle asks whether government-shutdown-mandated furloughs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hampered its response to the salmonella outbreak at Foster Farms. The bacteria traced to three of the firm's California poultry plants have sickened 278 people nationwide, mostly in California. The Heidelberg strain of salmonella appears to be especially virulent. As my colleague David Pierson reported, 42% of victims have been hospitalized , double the normal rate.

Much of the federal government will shut down as of midnight. What will be closing, why and what impact will it have? Question: Why a shutdown? Answer: Every year, Congress has to approve laws, known as appropriations, that provide money for federal agencies. The new budget year begins on Oct. 1, and Congress has failed to pass a single one of the appropriations. An effort to pass a stop-gap bill to provide temporary money has stalled in Congress: Republicans have insisted they will not approve the stop-gap measure unless Democrats agree to block money for President Obama's healthcare law, and Democrats have refused to do that.

Federal employees have been furloughed, federal assistance for those needing food has been threatened and tourists everywhere have been shut out of monuments and national parks as a result of the partial shutdown of the U.S. government. But the Washington budget standoff that triggered the shutdown has had an unexpected effect: Cancellation of a proposed KKK demonstration at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. The Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had received a special use permit to hold a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Military Park on Saturday.

We'll be seeing lots more data like these, but the White House Council of Economic Advisers is reporting that the government shutdown took a huge bite out of economic growth--and that the impact will linger. The chart above shows the effect on economic confidence, one of eight daily or weekly economic indicators tracked by the CEA. (The three lines follow three separate surveys, Gallup, Rasmussen and the University of Michigan.) Put briefly, confidence fell off a cliff. That's likely to bleed into the holiday period.

WASHINGTON - Americans' confidence in the economy has jumped since the end of the partial federal government shutdown in October, another positive sign for the recovery as the new year begins, according to data released Tuesday by Gallup. The public opinion firm's economic confidence index rose to minus-19 in December from minus-25 in November. The monthly average, based on Gallup's daily tracking interviews, had plunged to minus-35 in October as a partisan standoff in Washington caused many federal agencies to shut down for 16 days.